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Our Shop / Re: Expanding the old "tiny shop"
« Last post by vtsteam on Today at 03:39:35 PM »
Okay, tree and drain pipe sawed out of there. Now to try to dig that hole again.

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Our Shop / Re: Expanding the old "tiny shop"
« Last post by vtsteam on Today at 03:37:22 PM »
Just to give a picture of how bad things have become, here is what once was my outside molding casting area. The Big Dig is on the left.

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Our Shop / Re: Expanding the old "tiny shop"
« Last post by vtsteam on Today at 03:34:43 PM »
Okay so first step, digging a hole. I planned to pour a small concrete pad into the bottom, with some rebar sticking up, and when that cured a day, add sonotube and pour a concrete column up to about 4" above ground level with a J bolt at the top.

I got out the old two handled double clamshell posthole digger and well, immediate problems. a small tree, and also the rediscovery of a perimeter drain I installed about a decade ago.   :bang: Nothing is simple. I just wanted to dig a hole. Just to get into the mindset that I was building something....but now I have to dig a trench.

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Our Shop / Expanding the old "tiny shop"
« Last post by vtsteam on Today at 12:19:40 PM »
It has become nearly impossible to get into my tiny shop and work because of unfortunate new acquisitions. My parents in law passed away a year ago and we have been cleaning out their house to put on the market. A sad and difficult task. Tag sales, online sales, large filled dumpsters, relative giving still has not done the job. In the end it just seemed wasteful to throw many things away that we just couldn't place, materials, tools, metal shelving, I think you all probably understand.

But I'm at a point now when I wondering if I'm creating the same situation for my family. I'm getting rid of things I haven't used in a long while. Still I have to work in the shop or I'll go nutz. The original idea was to keep it small, and present interior usable space is about 6' by 8'. One of the reasons for building my small but rugged bench lathe was to minimize what I needed to do even largish jobs.

But I am overwhelmed at this point. And my shop is very poor in energy efficiency, other than the fact that it is very small. So I'm thinking about enlarging it, and adding insulation and considering how I can have heat in our severe winters here. I don't really want to do this. I don't have the motivation and energy I once had for more building. But we'll see if I can do it.

First thought is, maybe build the new shop over and around the old one. There isn't room to only expand laterally by adding on because of the roof snow loads. The would dump onto any addition, and everything would have to be higher anyway to get enough headroom at the edges.

The other possibility, discounted, was to level the old shop and build anew. But where would its contents go during construction? I have no more storage space at all (part of the reason for expansion). And it's all machine shop stuff that you really don't want to expose to the environment.

It seems to me that if I build a roof over the existing one, leaving it in place, the shop can continue to be usable while building the expansion, which would be handy. There's power, and tools and a vise, etc. Eventually I could deconstruct the old roof (it's just galvanized tin), and would have an upper storage space in its place for materials.

Another reason for not leveling the old shed, is that it's built like a brick ****house. Actually, cement block with the recesses filled with concrete and 1/2" rebar run down every other one for the full height of the walls. Why, you ask? Well it was actually originally built as an outdoor wood furnace, with 11 tons of sand contained inside for heat storage. Called a HAHSA, the design originally found in Mother Earth News. It actually never worked well, and was later converted into a furnace room for an experimental wood chip Hot water furnace I built. Its final iteration was as a tiny workshop for me and my homemade lathe.

Anyway, those are the thoughts. I'm trying to get motivated. Maybe posting here will push me forward. The 90+ F temps here have not been encouraging, but yesterday I did start digging a hole where a central post to support the new peak might be, and I account that a start.
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Good to see you working on this Andrew!  :beer:
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CNC / Re: My CNC Router
« Last post by vtsteam on Today at 10:27:36 AM »
 :wack:

A waste. I can achieve the same effect with a screwdriver bit. Basically it's a matter of applying high enough RPM at the start of the extraction process. I find I can use the same bit for this for thousands of screws.  :thumbup:
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A cheapish logic analyser and big bunch of resistor arrays ?
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And in some cases the digital outputs will be quite dynamic. For instance the 8 bits shown as '1's ' on the above picture are the data bus that the PLC uses to talk to the SMCC card that is a slave PLC that controls the tool turret - wheels within wheels comes to mind!
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CNC / Re: My CNC Router
« Last post by Joules on Today at 10:12:12 AM »
Using a milling cutter to drive in wood screws leaves them tamper proof 🤪
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So now I need to devise a way of testing the outputs. Presented as two cables again terminated in 37 pin D Sub connectors so compatible with the break out board. And again the PLC diagnostic allows me to see what it thinks that it's outputting (it's a Q word) :

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However the way (I think) that the PLC works is that it maintains a table of these bits that is updated by the PLC program and every cycle of the program the table is copied to the Q outputs.

This means that if the PLC program is running anything I write to the outputs will be overwritten in milliseconds and if the PLC program is NOT running I can't access the diagnostic facilities so a bit of a catch 22 situation.

I can do a somewhat less stringent test by reading a particular Q word and checking what is actually set but I'm not convinced that that's good enough?

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Off to scratch my head a bit !
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